Tales of Downfall and Rebirth

by S. M. Stirling

  “Looting?” I asked.

  Kirk pointed at the black bag slung over his shoulder. “I’m bringing things inside. That’s the opposite of looting, so it should be okay.”

  “No, not okay.”

  The officer reached for the walkie-talkie microphone on his shoulder and pressed the button, but nothing happened aside from a plastic click. Must have been reflex.

  “I can’t check if you’re authorized with dispatch, so you can’t proceed. It’s a public safety issue. You’ll have to leave the area immediately.”

  “I’ve got keys to prove we’re allowed.”

  I held out my wad of brass-colored do-not-duplicate keys that would make any custodian proud and jingled them as if I was trying to entertain a baby. Perhaps that wasn’t the smartest move. Short police officers didn’t like big guys like me.

  The officer’s hand dropped to rest on the butt of his sidearm.

  “I am delivering a final warning. Depart the premises.”

  “Don’t you have better things to do?”

  Kirk must have thought he was being reasonable and fair. But he really sounded pissed and condescending, which was why he got low teaching evals from his students. It had taken me a few months to get used to him.

  “I have to get my stuff. It’s in there.”

  “Show me what’s in the rifle case.”

  Kirk sighed and set the black bag down. He blew on his hands. “It’s not a rifle case. It’s just my exercise equipment—”

  “Open the goddamn case!” The frustrated officer drew his pistol.

  I stepped backward with my hands in the air. I thought that was what you were supposed to do. I’d never had a cop point a gun at me. Which was exactly what happened when I suddenly moved. The automatic was leveled at my chest.

  Kirk unzipped his case, exposing a handful of smooth sticks.

  “See?”

  “Dump it on the ground!” the officer ordered.

  The gun was trained on Kirk now.

  “I’m not dumping anything.” Kirk crouched and carefully shook the bag.

  The sticks slipped out, but then one of them separated with a gentle click of metal on wood. A shiny length of blade awash in moonlight appeared on the pavement. It was a real Japanese katana—the first time I had seen it—with wooden practice swords sprawled around it. Kirk reached for it. I believe he meant to keep it from getting scratched on the sidewalk.

  The recognizable metallic clack of a pistol hammer slamming home made me wince. But there was no bang. We all stared at the gun pointed at Kirk.

  “You were going to shoot me!” Kirk sounded offended.

  The officer worked the slide as he backed away. The unfired round flipped out. The slide snicked forward. Click. Click. Click. The officer repeatedly squeezed the trigger.

  Kirk growled and the katana was in his hand, free of its scabbard like a magic trick, as he rose from his knees. In a single fluid motion, the tip of the blade stopped at the officer’s throat.

  “You wanted to kill me!”

  The officer whimpered with the three-foot length of steel, presumably razor sharp, threatening his neck. His left hand had begun to reach to his belt, but now he seemed frozen. What did he have to counter a sword? A telescoping baton or pepper spray?

  “Kirk?” I asked, trying to appear calm. “What are you doing?”

  Kirk stood in a deep stance. A martial arts movie pose with arms extended. His back was perfectly military straight. Breath steamed from flared nostrils.

  “Self-defense.”

  “I don’t think that works against cops.” I eased forward. “Let’s not make another mistake tonight. Okay?”

  “Drop the gun,” Kirk snarled. “Then the belt.”

  The officer thought about being a hero. I’d seen the same wild animal look countless nights around two in the morning outside bars. However, never with a really, really big knife involved in the decision-making process. The officer dropped the gun and the equipment belt at his ankles.

  Kirk withdrew the blade and held it high, ready to strike. “Leave.”

  The campus officer snatched the bike and pedaled away.

  “You’re in deep shit,” I said. “He’ll be back.”

  Indignant, Kirk said, “He was going to shoot me.” He scooped up the pistol and belt.

  “And we’re both in deep shit, my friend.”

  The cop didn’t come back, but we barricaded the doors with scrounged chains and padlocks and piled classroom desks anyway. We hoped we could explain to the authorities when the lights came on.

  * * *

  DAY 1

  WITMER HALL, UND, GRAND FORKS ND

  The lights didn’t come back on, but the sun did rise in the east. The steam radiator beneath the window had lost pressure during the night, the popping and creaks faded, and the building had grown chilly.

  I had retrieved my sleeping bag, kept for overnight data collection, from my lab. I sat with my back against the wall in Kirk’s office facing the door. My stomach had been in knots all night and I jerked awake at every imagined sound. Kirk sat nearby with his sword across his lap and the cop’s gun on the desk.

  “I saw you wearing those black skirts in the gym a while ago. I thought you did aikido, like Steven Seagal. What are you doing with that sword? On campus?”

  “I practice iaido,” Kirk said.

  He didn’t sound worried at all, explaining as if it was a lecture question I had almost understood, but not quite.

  “Same black hakama as aikidoka, but deeper roots. Basically fast draw with a katana.”

  “Still shouldn’t have pulled that on the cop,” I said.

  “He was an incompetent ass.” Kirk gently tossed a large caliber shell at me.

  I caught the heavy round and peered at it. The brass casing had a dented primer. “You’re lucky it was a dud.”

  “The second one, too?” Kirk pulled the pistol off the desk.

  He racked the slide and tossed the other shell to me.

  Dented primer again.

  “Bad lot?” I guessed.

  “Mistakes that don’t go away become facts.”

  Kirk pointed the pistol toward the wall and pulled the trigger. He worked the slide and repeated. Eleven more shells fell on the floor with dented primers.

  “The world has changed, or at least this part of the world.”

  “Oh.”

  The power going out was understandable. Computers, too, if there was an EMP. Those events had explanations, although unlikely. But gunpowder? Batteries?

  “We need to test the limits,” Kirk said. “Find out what still works.”

  Then Kirk jumped up and went to the door in the back of his office. He carried the sword in his left hand. “Breakfast?”

  I followed him to what I had assumed was a storage closet the hundred times I’d been in his office. Kirk opened the door into another slightly smaller, windowless room. Must have been left over from when this was lab space. Shelves were lined with cans of food with faded labels or no labels at all. Water-stained cardboard boxes were piled on pallets. Some bore MARK DOWN and DENTED stickers like a cheap warehouse store. A camp stove sat in the corner next to a cot and a full laundry bag.

  “How long have you been living here and does Dr. Rao know?” I asked.

  * * *

  DAY 2

  WITMER HALL, UND, GRAND FORKS

  Kirk Vandermeer was a connoisseur of aged food. At first I thought he might be a nut-job survivalist preparing for the next flood. He explained that an ex-girlfriend who worked at the Human Nutrition Lab had turned him on to food that was past its sell-by date. The girlfriend had dumped him, which was why he lived out of his office, and he decided to conduct his own culinary experiments.

  “The flavor evolves,” he said. “Like very slow cooking. Just avoid
botulism.”

  Most of his stock was relatively fresh, bought from Hugo’s or the Walmart discount aisles. Some of the older tins had gone quite pungent, becoming an acquired taste or perhaps a test of courage. My dad had talked fondly of surströmming, fermented herring, from his trip back to Sweden. I miss the tuna and sardines though.

  We ate, slept, and sat holed up in Witmer Hall for the second day. Kirk had opened his undergrad physics text on the desk. I remember the bright yellow USED sticker on the red binding. I reread Leiber’s Swords Against Wizardry since it was lying around. But no one came for us.

  “I think I should get my stuff,” I said later that day, feeling antsy.

  Kirk didn’t look up from the textbook. “They probably won’t be after you.”

  “Yeah. Must have better things to do,” I said. “Like looking for a lunatic with a sword . . .”

  Kirk slammed the book closed. “Stay away from the supermarkets. Those will be getting ugly.”

  So I hiked from the loading dock into the crazy changed world toward the graduate apartments. Hand-printed signs warned people to stay home and not enter main campus grounds by order of the provost. The university cops were taking their duties to heart. So I skirted into the residential neighborhood to trek west. For all the strangeness, it was quiet as dusk settled. Most folks hunkered inside, staying warm. The lucky houses had wood smoke drifting from chimneys or old fuel oil furnaces that didn’t need electricity. The frats and sororities all had fireplaces. I crossed the English Coulee near the deserted dorms. Some pedestrians, wrapped more tightly than the previous days, waved at me in anonymity provided by scarves and knit caps. I kept my hood low. Overall there was a stoic sense of wait and see. Hadn’t we just survived a major catastrophe? At least the water wasn’t rising and nothing had burned down. The government or someone else would be here soon to sort things out. Sure. You betcha.

  * * *

  DAY 3

  GRADUATE HOUSING AND WITMER HALL, UND

  I returned the next morning with a duffel bag and large rucksack full of everything I could scrounge that might be useful. That meant my stereo system, television, and computer were left behind in the furnished apartment. I retrieved camping gear, my kitchen cutlery, blankets and towels, a bottle of vodka, and the other contents of my freezer. I also grabbed my Redwing work boots, my articulated knee brace, and my pouch of gaming dice. Even a valid excuse to not write on the dissertation made me feel guilty.

  I had cut across campus, but everyone else seemed to obey the warning signs. We were a law-abiding people, mostly. I didn’t see anyone else among the redbrick buildings, but carried a camp hatchet just in case. I banged on the steel loading dock door to have Kirk let me in. I dumped my load in his office.

  “I’m working through Halliday and Resnick.”

  At his desk, Kirk flipped the aging beige pages. He looked haggard, dark shadows under his eyes and dark stubble on his chin.

  “So far dynamics seems to be unchanged. Gravitation, too.”

  “Did you do the ball drop?”

  I hated that lab exercise as a TA for Physics I. The spring-loaded apparatus that launched a ball bearing horizontally and dropped another one straight down must have been sixty years old. If I never had to do that experiment again, I’d be perfectly happy.

  “Raided the teaching lab and did pendulum measurements. The timing works out.”

  Kirk held up a self-winding Seiko dive watch, fat against his slender wrist. “Also looked at the orbits of Mars and Venus. Took the telescope to the roof while you were gone last night. Good viewing without sodium streetlights. But it might be a while before anything changes at that scale.”

  “Very systematic.” I blinked at the morning sunlight that was warming the cold room. “I wonder if the sun is still working.”

  “Fusion? That’s beyond the scope of this course.” Kirk smiled and his bloodshot eyes glittered with a strange enthusiasm. “But I’ll check the spectral lines if I can locate the correct filters.”

  “It’ll be years before we see dimming.” I remember solving the stat-mech problems to determine how long a photon took to escape from the core to the chromosphere. Eight years or something. Then it would really get cold for everyone. No more North Dakota bragging rights.

  Kirk nodded. “Now’s our chance to make a real impact. To understand what’s happened.”

  I found a cheap solar-powered calculator on the desk and picked it up on the off chance it might work. It didn’t. I tossed the useless calculator onto the desk.

  “Calculators on the fritz . . . what did they use before? Slide rules and log tables? Isn’t that what Dr. Soonpa uses?”

  “We chose this path,” Kirk admonished. “We chose understanding the universe over an easy life. If we hadn’t, we’d be down on South Padre Island right now with the rest of the spring break partiers, getting drunk.”

  “And meeting women.”

  “Drunken women,” he said with disdain.

  “Your point?” I leered down at him and he finally laughed.

  * * *

  DAY 4

  WITMER HALL

  “First we should check Boyle’s Law.”

  Kirk led me to the roof through the service stairway. He had his katana tucked into his belt.

  “Which one is that again?” I asked, a bit sheepish. “An ideal gas?”

  “The product of pressure and volume of a gas remain constant,” Kirk said. “Remember pushing the Duster? There was no compression from the engine. Strange, don’t you think?”

  We stepped onto the flat asphalt and tar-lined roof. It was a sunny day and well into the mid-forties, so the remaining snow created puddles. I noticed a dusty Weber grill with a broken wheel and beat-up lawn furniture in an empty patch of roof next to the air handling enclosure. The department’s eight-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope was on a tripod next to the chaise longue. The piston and cylinder experiment for demonstrating hydraulics to the education majors sat by the grill.

  “What do you need me for?” I asked.

  “You need to confirm my methods and results, so I know I’m not going schizoid.”

  Kirk set his sword on the chair and knelt by the hydraulic experiment: two clear Plexiglas cylinders, one half the diameter of the other. Fancy plungers with gaskets and handle grips were inserted in the cylinders and tubing ran between them. Two dial pressure gauges poked out the side of both. He pressed gently on the fat plunger and the skinny plunger rose up slowly as air transferred through the connecting tube. The needles on the gauges barely registered.

  “Now you try. Give it a real shove.”

  “I’ll probably break it.” I leaned over and gripped the plunger. Then I shoved it down with all my strength. A momentary resistance vanished and the volume in the fat cylinder decreased without corresponding movement from the skinny plunger.

  “There must be a leak.”

  We repeated the experiment several times. I couldn’t find the leak. The rubber gaskets were sealed. But sudden pressure change much above one atmosphere seemed to bleed off. For the first time in a long time, I felt scared, because I really didn’t understand.

  “How did this happen?”

  “It’s not the overall pressure. It’s the delta, the rate of change of pressure. I wonder if there would be any sonic booms?”

  “No, not just the experiment. Everything. How did this happen? Why doesn’t anything work? What changed?”

  “One question at a time.” Kirk, seeing my face, switched topic.

  He glanced up at the large water tower to the south, past the geology building. “We should collect fresh water while there’s still pressure in the pipes. We might be here a while.”

  “How long? I’m worried about my folks,” I said.

  That was mostly true. My dad would be fine, except come deer season if guns really weren’t working. My
mom would have a harder time if she didn’t get her soaps.

  “Are you going to walk forty miles with that knee?” Kirk asked, mockingly.

  His mother was in Houston, fourteen hundred miles away.

  I shut up.

  * * *

  DAY 5

  WITMER HALL

  The next day on the roof, we got a metal piston in a fitted barrel, once used to compress ceramic powder samples for Dr. Soonpa, and a propane torch for brazing pipe fittings. The small green propane cylinder still held gas, supporting the change in pressure hypothesis. The piston didn’t have a gauge, so we piled graduated weights on the top. We heated the piston with a few millimeters of water trapped inside. Kirk removed mass after mass, waiting for the piston to move. The temperature was high, above boiling, but no expansion.

  Kirk took the last ten-gram weight off the piston top. “A tea kettle might whistle, but not much else. Good-bye Industrial Revolution.”

  “Is mass no longer conserved?”

  I quenched the small torch. PV = nRT was a law. Had Avogadro’s number changed with temperature? How could it? It was just a number and supposed to be constant.

  As the cylinder cooled, the piston slowly sucked down. Kirk pulled the piston out with a vacuum pop as it released.

  “It’s as if all the hot molecules just escaped.”

  We repeated the same experiment several times, varying the added water, the heating time, everything we could think of. The same results, a dramatically irreversible process.

  “Maybe it’s a bubble universe, a brane, that’s enveloped our region of space,” I proposed.

  Branes were the big thing in theoretical physics. A separation between universes had slipped somehow.

  Kirk scoffed.

  “A brane wouldn’t be permeable to physical matter. Otherwise there would be mass diffusion and no separation of universes.”

  “Okay, maybe another fundamental force has frozen out of a cooling universe? Like the electro-weak did.”

  “Doesn’t match with observables and it’s not testable.” Kirk rubbed his moustache with a finger. “It’s like Maxwell’s demon has taken control.”